Building a solid piece of hardware has always been one of our topmost priorities and we're about to announce the most important news in this department to this day: We're ditching the retractable cable in favor of the cord cable.
Over time, we've contacted multiple retractable cable manufacturers to find reliable cables and got samples from multiple sources. Despite the wide variety of retractable cables, these things have been failing on us like there's no tomorrow. Sometimes the springy mechanism got loose, other times the electical connection failed, but regardless, all of them died eventually.
Some of you have voiced your concern in this respect and as a response in our What's in the Box post we let you know that a cord cable will be provided next to the retractable cable but it doesn't make any sense anymore to ship an extra cable that surely breaks in the short run. According to our understanding there's no way anyone can manufacture a reliable retractable cable at this price point and the market does not tolerate a higher price so there are no reliable retractable cables on the market.
When we were at Prezi some of the folks over there told us that we must not be serious about using retractable cables. Given that yet another cable failed us there, that was the turning point. We're fully confident that this change will benefit everyone involved. Heck, probably even our image got better now that the retractable cable doesn't spoil it!
Yet another good news is that you'll be able to use any cross-over 4P4C RJ11 telephone handset cord or telephone line cord as a replacement. Such cables are in wide circulation and accessible to everyone for pennies.
Let us take a last look on the retractable cable because we won't ever see it again.
Rest in piece, you unreliable piece of crap.
10 Comments
Sad. I would have enjoyed a high retractable cable. But you have sound reasons that I am willing to accept.
Thank you for your understanding, Jacob! Yeah, the retractable cable has became a part of our image and it was somewhat hard for us to let it go but we had to in the best interest of everyone involved.
Doesn't the new cable pull both sides of the keyboard together if they have a long way from each other?
It does, good point! We'll carefully choose the cable length as such that it will be long enough.
I agree that the retractable cable is not very durable, but a cord cable is not a very good choice.
It will pull the two sides together, and it won't feel very long because of this;
Judging from the picture, this cable won't allow more than 15-20cm flex comfortably.
The length that can be seen on the picture is not representative. We'll yet to figure out the exact length which should be long enough. If you have any alternative cable ideas then please let us know – it's remarkably hard to come up with viable solutions in this respect.
My Matias Ergo Pro came with a retractable cable. It was flaky and I had to go out and buy another cable. The coil cable looks like a much better option.
Any idea when these will actually be for sale and what the price will be?
We plan to start our campaign in two months. If you signed up to our mailing list (via the I want one button on our index page) then we'll let you know when it starts.
The special price during the campaign will be around $200.
In subscription email i still see old keyboard image with old cable. Can you replace it with new image of keyboard?
Sure thing! Just updated the image, thanks a ton for the heads up!
Comments are closed.